Are ghosts real?

I don’t think so. I’ve never seen one. And there’s nary a rational scientific hypothesis for them to exist.

It’s Myrtle’s ghost!

I do know they make a lot of money for some people. I wouldn’t mind being the guy who is selling ghosthunting software, for example. And ghost-hunt organizers are increasingly making money in Britain. So that may be one explanation for why some people believe in ghosts.

Anyway, if you have seen a ghost, I’m not writing this blog entry to offend you. However you should know that there have been some interesting scientific studies in recent years that may explain why people think they have seen ghosts.

Like:

• It’s all in your mind. Canadian psychologists used 1 microTesla transcerebral magnetic fields to induce synthetic ghosts in an observer’s mind.

• Your reasoning skills may be suspect. London scientists surveyed 174 members of the Society for Psychical Research and found that reasoning abnormalities may have a causal role in paranormal beliefs.

77 Responses

GHOSTHUNTERS??? OMFG!!! GHOST HUNTERS ARE A JOKE!!!!!! I remember they were busted by anyone resembling a brain last year during thier live Halloween episode. FAKE!!!! Now Destination Truth is a real show that does not try to prove hauntings or monsters. They just go out to find the truth, real or fake!

My uncle was in the VA on a respirator for a few weeks. The pulse straight-lined, but the electrical impulse took awhile to stop. As the words left my lips, “The impulse came before the pulse; and, it started sixty years ago”; I saw a falling star through the window pierce the dark, as close as the parking lot.

What is a ghost?

Some people hear, but refuse to listen. All of us have a pulse, and most of us live; but cannot feel (Hardly living). When your pulse is a straight-line; for some there may be calm, maybe we meander. What do you ‘want’ to see; more importantly, why?

Goblins exist. Seriously. I saw one today at Oriental Gourmet. Ate a crapton of food and didn’t even leave a tip.MT, you say of science “You can’t prove it. So it CANT be.” This is not true. In science, if we can’t prove it we tend to say it is unproven. World of difference.

Humans have amazing minds and we can believe anything we wish to believe. Our brains are incredibly powerful.I once had a problem with all 4 wisdom teeth. My mouth ached and throbbed. Went to the dentist and expected to hear the worst. Imagine my surprise when I found out I only had one wisdom tooth. The pain completely disappeared within three minutes.It’s all just a matter of perception.

Eric, are you telling me that it was really Larry King last night on CNN? That it was really Hulk Hogan wrestling on TNA Wrestling this week? Are you sure ghosts don’t exist? There is no way those two are still alive!

“So Everett came up with this universal wave function, which is just [Austrian physicist Erwin] Schrödinger’s equation for describing how elementary particles move around writ large–that is, applied to the whole universe! And it makes beautiful mathematical and logical sense. Actually, it’s very much in use in physics today. However, it has consequences to it that people were and remain uneasy with, which basically is that everything that is possible happens. This assertion, which Everett backed up mathematically, solves, according to him and his supporters, the so-called measurement problem, which is kind of the “dirty little secret” that has been afflicting quantum mechanics since it was invented and then formalized in 1920s.”

“To quantize the universe, let us first consider an electron. We know from chemistry class that the electron can exist simultaneously in infinitely many orbitals surrounding the nucleus. (Because of the Uncertainty Principle, we can never know for sure precisely which state the electron is in, until an observation is made.) These are “parallel electrons.” This strange fact about electrons has been verified thousands of times in the laboratory.

Now if we quantize the universe, we must treat it like an electron. Because of Uncertainty, this means that the universe must also exist simultaneously in an infinite number of states. These are parallel universes. ”

…bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha… c’mon, that’s got to be at least as scary as ghosts, right? I mean, okay, so maybe there is no and never will be scientific proof that your cocker-spaniel Fifi went to puppy heaven and comes back every Oct. 31 to leave you a special present on your doorstep, but what about the idea that Fifi (or a reasonable approximation thereof) *is* alive out there in a parallel universe… somewhere… Hm?

If you’re asking me whether I think the present scientific understandings of our universe and it’s mysteries are complete, I would wholeheartedly say no.

If you’re asking me to believe in ghosts, however, you had better have some credible, testable evidence for it.

Eric

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I guess it’s all going to come down to how we define “ghosts” isn’t it? I mean, if you’re talking about an ectoplasmic apparition that goes “wooooooooo” in the night, okay. No. Probably no ghosts. But… if we want to talk about the existence of beings outside our known universe and our known dimensions of space and time, then haven’t scientists like Schrödinger, Everett, Hawking, Michio Kaku – and other physicists who provide us with the mathematical underpinnings of our physical universe – haven’t they made it pretty clear that somewhere out there the dead (in our universe) are still alive (in a parallel universe)? Couldn’t we consider them “ghosts”? How about just for Halloween?

Just like Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, space aliens pulling college student pranks, and that thousands of government workers could completely hide an massive illegal operation. Why, the existence of honest politicians will be doubted, as well as the existence of the Free Lunch.

The fact that no one has gathered any repeatable, unambiguous, and non-anecdotal evidence is beside the point. The only thing science can say about them is that there is no reliable evidence for their existence, nor a hypothesis that fits within the current physics model.

The History of the human race shows very clearly that human beings have “transcendent” experiences of Reality which go far beyond what we can glean of “being human” through Anthropology and Genetics, and these experiences are Symbolized in linguistic/cultural terms.

It’s not at all the fault of Natural Science that our investigations via this method into Human Existence fall short of the complete picture of the Human Being.

In Natural Science we are confined to study our Human existence within very certain and, in the nature of the case, extremely strict boundaries on the admissibility of the observations as evidence.

When we reach this point in Natural Science, the Social Sciences which are cognizant of the Human Mind independent of physicalism become relevant.

And the genuine Science in these disciplines — I speak here of History, Linguistics, Symbolism, for example — show that the Symbols ( ie, “ghosts”) generated by these experiences are co-related on the level of what the Ancient Greeks termed “Pathos” — the fundamental level of the ground of existence of the Human, upon which ground we are all Humans.

Natural Science **must** break out of its methodological confinement to take, for example, these “Symbols” and the processes which generate them into consideration.

This is why I consider Jay Gould and E.O.Wilson the greatest of our Biologists

— like Galileo, like Newton, like Einstein, they know this/knew this, and understand/understood completely that the Natural Sciences and the Human Sciences

— which were first primitively integrated by Plato and Aristotle

— must be joined together again to explain who we really are.

The conceit that these are “primitive superstitions” must be replaced by a Scientific view of the Human Being which includes this process of Symbolism as a distinctively Human trait.

A Natural Science which relegates these experiences to oblivion is not worth the government research funds it is based upon.

Hey Tom T, there’s a mystic over on Westheimer who want’s to put you in contact with some of your dead relatives………….

One good thing – there are far fewer ghosts and demons now than there used to be when the good church was having witches burned alive so as not to spill blood……..considered totally rational at the time by the good church.

Think about it – society taking a woman out to a pile of wood and burning her ALIVE – horribly disgusting

Re IANVS’ comment: “Give a well-connected Hellenistic Jewish super-salesman from Tarsus enough time with a paying gentile audience and, who knows, we may have to add a few more good stories to our holy book.”

Lets hope IANVS was just trying to get a rise out of me by that little comment, because if not, it sure does cast doubt on the ‘legitimacy’ and ‘integrity’ of all the other information he’s presented here at Sciguy.

You know perfectly well what a boldface ‘fib’ you just stated, while attempting to smear a dead man’s good reputation…which I’m going to have to defend now since he’s not here to do it himself. (although I’m sure he’s looking down and glaring at you right now) =)

The Apostle Paul was neither a super-salesman or a “peddler of the word of God as many men are” (2 Cor 2:17) In order to become a Christian minister, he gave up and left behind his life and religious training as a Jewish Pharisee -which would have been a very prominent and lucrative career choice at that time, commanding much respect and persuasion among the people. Have you forgotton that he didn’t collect a paycheck from either the ‘gentiles’ or his countrymen, but rather he laboriously supported his ministry as a tent-maker with Aquila and Prisca?

And to ‘cement’ the accuracy of that fact, it’s well established that the men who truly were the ‘super-salesmen’ of the Hellenistic/Judaic marketplace of that time, were constantly driving Paul out of town by inciting mobs against him, and having him beaten, lashed, imprisoned, and even stoned, because he was so ‘bad for business’

So IANVS…don’t let me catch you telling anymore ‘whoppers’ like that again.

And say, what did you ‘go as’ for Halloween this year? Yourself? or did you pick a less sinister/more subtle costume choice this time?